February 26, 2013

Challenge: An Omniscient God Can't Exist

Can God know what it is like to learn? If God is omniscient
(all-knowing), then it seems that he would have to know what it is like
to learn. However, in order to know what it is like to learn, one must
have learned something, which involves moving from a state of
not-knowing to a state of knowing. This entails that at one time we were
in a state of not-knowing a thing that was learned, then experienced
what it is like to learn. But if God is essentially omniscient, he
always is and has been omniscient, so was never in a state of
not-knowing. Because being in a state of not-knowing is necessary to
know what it is like to learn, we would seem to have to say that God
does not know what it is like to learn. But this contradicts the
original claim that he does know this based on his omniscience. Thus, it
seems that God's omniscience generates a contradiction. Consequently an
omniscient God cannot exist.

What do you say? Does the idea of an omniscient God create an unresolvable contradiction? Tell us how you would answer this challenge in the comments below, and then on Thursday Brett will post his video answer.

Comments

I'm not sure what omni-science actually even means. Logically speaking, it is impossible to know that you know everything, as how you would you know that there is no information that you don't know about? Basically, how does God know he is God? It is of course logical to assume God knows everything about the universe, because he is the one who created it, but as God has not created himself, how does he know he's own aspects and how his mind works? So, knowledge and information has to be understood in some very unique way to understand concept like "omni-science".

One can know what it is to learn without having a learning experience. There are a great deal of things I can comprehend without having done it. I can know what it is to have robbed a bank without having done it.

It is the false distinction that Satan offers in the garden. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as called by God, was an intellectual knowledge, which God never forbade, only to eat of the fruit of it . But Satan offered an intimacy, when he said "knowing good and evil" used the same word often used of sex, that is a "knowing" that becomes part of you. They could have "known" intellectually, the difference by obs racing and rebukijg Satan instead of "knowing" the difference by taking part in it, never being able to rid themselves of that intimacy.

First of all, it's a mistake to think linearly, as if God is somehow constrained by time. From this perspective it's quite easy to comprehend how God knows all things. From what little I've read on this subject, the best conception of time as it relates to eternity was written by Lewis Sperry Chafer [Systematic Theology, 1948, 1976 Dallas Theological Seminary (1993), Kregel, Grand Rapids, MI; Vol. VII, pp 141-142], and this adequately explains how God is omniscient:

“…Whatever time may be and whatever its relation to eternity, it must be maintained that no cessation of eternity has occurred or will. God’s mode of existence remains unchanged. Time might be thought of as something superimposed upon eternity were it not that there is ground for question whether eternity consists of a succession of events, as is true of time. The consciousness of God is best conceived as being an all-inclusive comprehension at once, covering all that has been or will be. The attempt to bring time with its successions into a parallel with eternity is to misconceive the most essential characteristic of eternal things.

God knows what it is like to learn because he created learning itself.

A huge number of these attempts to argue away God assume God is just like us, bound with the same constraints of time and experience as man. It takes an understanding that God is really *not like* man to truly grasp that little wordplay games like this miss the entire character of God, instead reducing him to some kind of superhero man.

Might it be that this is one of those cases where a perceived limitation in one aspect is actually a perfection in another? For instance, this kind of argument: if God is omnipotent then He can do anything; God cannot lie, therefore He is not omnipotent. However, His inability to lie is a perfection of His Goodness, not a limitation of His omnipotence. So, His perceived inability to "know what it is like to learn" is not a limitation of His omniscience, but a perfection of His eternal nature.

Furthermore, Jesus did learn: "And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men." [Luke 2:52] Jesus is God, problem solved.

Well we could argue about whether or not its logically possible to know what it means to learn without having partaken in learning, I think this challenge is flawed from the offset based on the assumption that God must be capable of logically incoherent things in order to exist.

This challenge, while different, is similar to the "Can God create a rock so big even he can't lift it?" challenge. Saying that God is omnipotent and omniscient is simply to say God is capable of all things that power can logically accomplish and capable of knowing all things that can logically be known. The fact that God cannot do logically incoherent things is not in any way a limitation of his power and or knowledge.

Know-Ing with the Triune Topography of God was discussed a few weeks ago in "Why the Trinity Is So Important in the First Place". Like all things about God, it, Know-Ing, is not uni-linear and one dimensional. If A is Perfect, and A is not B, and B is also Perfect, and so on with C, which is AB, well, that tells us something about Perfection and all which is found within that Perfection. This alone solves this riddle. Also, I think we agree with Spencer. I also agree with Wisdomlover when he stated something along the lines of, "In the Cross Jesus/God knows what failure/sin tastes like". (probably terribly misquoted but, well, somewhere in that arena).

Time, or the lack of Time, within the Triune's interior brings in yet another whole series of vectors stacked atop all of these Motions within God already mentioned.

FYI to our Infidel.Org friends: this is all a non-starter from the get-go given the Triune Topography of God's Perfection (as many things are) and, more importantly, God, Actual Actuality, Is-Love.

This challenge actually misses even bigger conundrum. If we assume God is all-knowing, then this ought to entail that God knows what's it like to be a human. Now, of course big part of being human is that we are not all-knowing and live with linear reference of time. So for God to know what inherent uncertainty is, not knowing everything is like, he would have to not know all and at least partially exist in a linear reference of time in order to experience it. So in some way, I guess we would have to limit knowledge as "data" in this sense, not knowledge as "experience". I got the feeling that this was what Jason Ruzek was hinting at.

1. The resurrection proves Jesus of Nazareth was God.
2. Jesus considered the Old Testament scripture.
3. The Old Testament states that the fool says in his heart there is no God.
4. Infidels.org claims there is no God.
5. Infidels.org's statements concerning God are foolish.
6. Therefore their challenge is foolish.

Your approach is begging the question. If there is no God, the resurrection did not happen or was something completely else (trick, space aliens, time traveller). So in order to have resurrection, you have to start with God.

Know-Ing within the Triune Topography of God was discussed a few weeks ago in "Why the Trinity Is So Important in the First Place". Like all things about God, it, Know-Ing, is not uni-linear and one dimensional. If A is Perfect, and A is not B, and B is also Perfect, and so on with C, which is AB, well, that tells us something about Perfection and about all vectors found within that Perfection. This alone solves this riddle. Also, I think we agree with Spencer’s points on limits in some of this. I also agree with Wisdomlover when he stated something along the lines of, "….in the Cross Jesus/God knows what failure/sin tastes like…" (Probably terribly misquoted but, well, somewhere in that arena).

Time, or the lack of Time, within the Triune's interior brings in yet another series of vectors stacked atop all of these Motions within God already mentioned here and in "Why the Trinity Is So Important in the First Place".

FYI to our Infidel.Org friends: this is all a non-starter from the get-go, just as many things are non-starters from the get-go given the Triune Topography of Perfection, and, more importantly, God, Actual Actuality, Is-Love.

Errki, seems to me kpolo ins't proving God here, or the resurrection of Jesus, he's arguing that infidels.org is foolish. You might want to challenge the premises, but it looks as if 1,2,3,4,5 then 6 is sound.

"I do mean experiential knowledge. And Christ's experience of the human condition isn't limited to His own sinless life in the face of temptation. He also took on the sins of the whole world. In that act He experienced what it was like to fail also. He experienced what it was like for me to fail in every single one of my failures."

(..from "Why the Trinity Is So Important in the First Place"...)

These Motions do not "first happen" here within Time. But that is another discussion.

In the Cross we find all vectors merging, all questions answered, and Love Himself made Manifest.

Typepad is being finnicky about the length of posts again. I'm signed in to STR and signed in to TypePad, but this longinsh comment is still getting bounced.

I'll break it in two. Fortunately there's a natural faultline for that.

There are two ways to look at this, from the inside and from the outside. Either way, God does know exactly what it is like to be human.

From the inside, the Second Person of the Godhead, Christ, is human. Fully human. And so all those things that an unfallen man would experience Christ has experienced. And God, thus, knows all those experiences through Christ.

What is more, Christ, who knew no sin, became sin for our sake. So even the state of fallen Man is known by God through Christ.

Finally, Christ took on my sin, my pain, my failures which is part of my every though, act, desire and choice. So every aspect of my life is known to God at least as fully as I myself know it.

(Continuing from the last post...turns out I'll have to break this one up too. I start by introducing another apparent problem. I'll then solve that and the problem from the OP at the same time)

From the outside, there is more to say about Divine Omniscience than just that God knows everything. It is not just that God has good evidence for all His beliefs and they also happen all to be true. There is more to be said. In God's case, it is not logically possible for God to hold a belief and be wrong about that belief. He doesn't just happen to be right about everything He believes, He couldn't be wrong.

But that's a pretty strange thing to say. There are some beliefs I hold where I couldn't be wrong. We've had several threads on that recently. For example I couldn't be wrong about the law of self-identity. I also don't think it is possible for me to be wrong about my own thought and existence (at least at the moment I am having the thought).

But there are also a whole host of beliefs that I hold where I could be wrong, and where it seems impossible that anyone could be so infallible as we say God is. I believe that the side bar on this web site is red. Could I be wrong? It sure seems so.

Even assuming that we are talking about the color that is actually on my screen (not what was designed in by the web page designer). Mischievous leprechauns, or an Evil Genius, or a side-effect from some medicine I'm taking could be interfering with the causal processes that lead from the screen to my belief about its color.

And even if, as I would do, you take an immaterialist line (in which case you'd say that all that talk about drugs and leprechauns doesn't make you wrong about the color) there are all sorts of wrong conclusions I could draw from my perception of the color. For example, I might assume that the bytes representing the R part of the color code for those pixels on the screen are larger than the G and B bytes.

The general problem seems to be this. There are a whole host of beliefs that I have where the world distinct from myself is giving me data from which I form my beliefs. And there's a very complex multi-stage process that gets me from what is given to my belief. Any stage of that process could be corrupted by any number of forces outside my control, both natural and super-natural.

As such, it seems that for those sorts of beliefs, I could always be wrong. It seems that any believer who is distinct from the part of the universe about which he is forming beliefs could be wrong.

Now God is distinct from the entire created order, so it would seem that God's beliefs about any creature should be fallible. And this is precisely what we are saying He is not.

But there is a critical difference between the beliefs God has about His external world and the beliefs other believers have about their external worlds. God creates His external world with omnipotent power. God makes what He knows and there is nothing, natural or super-natural, outside of His control. As such there is nothing, natural or super-natural, outside His control that could corrupt the data He makes for Himself to form beliefs about.

But how could He, being unlimited, know about the limitations of His creatures?

Do you think that an author doesn't know all about the limitations of the characters he creates? The better the author is, the more sympathy he ends up having with his characters. Even villains who are not like the author at all. I don't think that Shakespeare was much like Shylock or MacBeth. But I think he knew them intimately because he had great sympathy for them. God's sympathy with His characters is perfect. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that the very life of those characters is the sympathy He has for them. So of course He knows their limitations at least as well as they do.

On the specific question of learning, God knows exactly what it is like to learn. One can know exactly what it is like to do something without doing that thing. God need not learn in order to have all the knowledge of the learner.

In first reading the challenge, I felt the problem was a difficulty in perception of what omniscience is, seeing that it is something lacking in the whole lot of us. But I got to think of those basics in Euclidian geometry, specifically of the concept of the "plane." In teaching this to children, it is dificult to speak of "going on forever without ending in all directions" to little ones who can see the total area of the whiteboard on which you've been drawing rays, and points, and segments, and lines (another one of those infinity thingees in this area of math).

I think of our knowledge as the point within the plane. The plane can contain the point, in the same way that God, who knows our thoughts, can understand our extensions of knowledge, what we labeled learning. I hold our situation in conceiving the quality of God's omniscience as if there was a new geometric figure called an "expansive point," a point that moves in all directions, enlarging itself as it moves to the extremes of the plane, knowing that limit is never reached.

Spencer, I also have heard the ""Can God create a rock so big even he can't lift it?" pseudo-argument, too. I always respond that even in this the One who formed and maintains the universe is still the one who stumbled under the weight of the cross.

Errki, seems to me kpolo ins't proving God here, or the resurrection of Jesus, he's arguing that infidels.org is foolish. You might want to challenge the premises, but it looks as if 1,2,3,4,5 then 6 is sound.

I kind of assumed that it was a joke, but this being the Internet, didn't want to take the chance that maybe someone actually thinks this way.

But how could He, being unlimited, know about the limitations of His creatures?

Do you think that an author doesn't know all about the limitations of the characters he creates?

I don't think this is a very good comparison as characters in a fiction obviously do not exist in any sense apart from the authors (and audiences) imagination, so of course by definition the author "knows" all that there is to know about the character. But humans being you know, flesh and blood humans and with separate free will are distinct from the creator.

Scbrownlhrm brought up an interesting point -- namely, "... of course big part of being human is that we are not all-knowing and live with linear reference of time. So for God to know what inherent uncertainty is, not knowing everything is like, he would have to not know all and at least partially exist in a linear reference of time in order to experience it. So in some way, I guess we would have to limit knowledge as 'data' in this sense, not knowledge as 'experience'."

God has never claimed to be an "all-experiencing" Being. God has never experienced the roller-coaster at your local amusement part, but does this somehow infringe upon his omniscience, His wisdom? Of course not. It's comparing apples to oranges.

Secondly, an important question arises: what is experience? If it is merely a feeling, the feeling of riding a roller-coaster, then experience is a series of chemical and physics equations - something that God is certain to understand.

If it is a state of being, the state of experiencing the constraints of a linear time dimension for example, then this leads us to a previously mentioned principle concerning the nature of God: He can't do things that are logically contradictory to the entirety of His nature.

The state of experiencing a linear time dimension is contradictory to the eternal nature of God, just as the state of producing evil, is entirely contradictory to the moral perfection of God.

I don't think I have any existence apart from God's constant maintenance/re-creation of me. In Him we live and move and have our being. So we are very much like characters in a book that God is writing.

DGFischer your comment was quite helpful when you noted this: "I think of our knowledge as the point within the plane. The plane can contain the point, in the same way that God, who knows our thoughts, can understand our extensions of knowledge, what we labeled learning. I hold our situation in conceiving the quality of God's omniscience as if there was a new geometric figure called an "expansive point," a point that moves in all directions, enlarging itself as it moves to the extremes of the plane, knowing that limit is never reached..."

Why is "knowing what is like to learn" necessary for omniscience? The writers have not made a case for that at all. I do not know that I must accept that premise. One might also know that God does not know what it is like to sin, therefore he does not know everything, therefore he is not omniscient. Also, if God knows all there is to know, then there is nothing else to be known and learning is not necessary. Learning is not a necessary attribute of God.

Ontologically speaking, God is the greatest conceivable being--otherwise He wouldn't be God. If we can think of something greater than God--than THAT would be God (cf. W. Craig). The point here is that God, by definition, has to be the pinnacle of everything that we in our finite state can comprehend. So, this includes omnipotence, omniscience, etc.

I think the problem a lot of people have is that they picture God as a guy who is sitting on the clouds eating grapes all day. God is outside of time and space--He created time and space. He isn't under the same limitations as humans are.

It really boggles my mind the kind of parlor games and mental gymnastics people will play to avoid worshipping God. What is so miserable about doing that?

The problem with the challenge is not that it presents a logical impossibility and then asks God to do that. The problem with the challenge is that it assumes that the only way that one can know what it is like to learn is to learn. If learning and knowing what it is like to learn were the same thing, then there would indeed be no way to know what it is like to learn without learning (and since learning involves prior ignorance...that would be a problem). But knowing what it is like to learn is not the same thing as learning.

God actually knows what it is like to learn all sorts of things that no one can learn. For example, it is impossible to learn that the Moon is made of green cheese. The reason for that is simple. The Moon is not made of green cheese, so even if one believed that the Moon is made of green cheese, and even if one had some evidence for that, the statement is not true, so it cannot be known. and because it cannot be known, it cannot be learned. But for all that, God knows exactly what it is like to learn that the Moon is made of green cheese. Even I have an inkling of what it is like to learn that.

Well, well, looks like our old friends at infidels.org are at it again. Here they go borrowing inductive reasoning (an abstract they can't account for), from the Christian worldview, to assert something God isn't. This should be good. Thanks for sharing STR!

God has never claimed to be an "all-experiencing" Being. God has never experienced the roller-coaster at your local amusement part, but does this somehow infringe upon his omniscience, His wisdom? Of course not. It's comparing apples to oranges.

/

I was thinking that this is kind of theologically interesting, as big part of knowledge is experience. If one is asked do you know what it is like to have sex, or to love someone, obviously the answer is not something like "yes, I do know the mechanics of human reproduction" or "yes, I do know that humans have emotional attachments do each other". This kind of begs the question what exactly then God actually feels and experiences, and isn't it rather limiting if knowledge is really limited to simply "data"?

The argument rests on the assumption that we can understand God and argue about Him as if he was human, as if Human logic applied. you thought I was altogether like you. Psalm 50:21. Your thoughts are not my thoughts ,Isaiah 55:8. An Omniscient Omnipotent Omnipresent God CAN know what its like to learn, what is like to be a baby and grow in wisdom and understanding, even before He was incarnate as Jesus Christ and eperienced it all!

God's knowing makes things what they are. His knowledge is more quantitative and more qualitative than ours. We can know nothing apart from His giving of the knowledge and He hasn't yet decided to give us the understanding of this particular idea.

Exactly. As such He has the knowledge of the learning experience that we would expect the creator of the learning experience to have. That is to say, a far deeper and more detailed experience than the learner has.

I think that this is just a variation of "If God is all powerful, can he make a stone too heavy for him to lift." I think that it is logically impossible for an omniscient God to learn something. God cannot do the logically impossible.

Do people really make this argument? It seems like a useless refutation of god. How would any living creature have any idea if some disembodied been knew everything or not? They wouldn't. But they would make up a story about such a being so they could claim the privilege of divine revelation and rule others with supposed divine authority. Are you sure you're not making a straw man out of this alleged argument so you can appear to easily knock it down in your video response?

The contradiction I've most often heard is that a god cannot be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent (basically, the problem of evil). Of course, that's not an argument I care much about either. That one seems mostly to attract former Christians-turned-atheist and I was never a Christian.

Anyhow, I'm sure your video response will be some lame pseudo-philosophical nonsense like it always is. These videos don't really challenge non-believers. They just bolster the faith (belief with no good evidence) of true believers who don't like to think for themselves.

Jim, you can click the link for yourself if you doubt it's real. I didn't invent infidels.org.

As for your Statler and Waldorf commentary, I'm not in the mood for it, so consider yourself warned.

Third, Jesus doesn't exactly fit your scenario:

And there arose also a dispute among them as to which one of them was regarded to be greatest. And He said to them, "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who have authority over them are called 'Benefactors.' But it is not this way with you, but the one who is the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like the servant. For who is greater, the one who reclines at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at the table? But I am among you as the one who serves."

Christianity calls leaders to servanthood, not rulership.

Fourth, that's the end of this conversation between us (on this post). We're not going to drag this challenge off on a tangent. The comments in the challenges ought to be even more focused than usual since the comments are the whole point.

I don't think it's quite as simple as you suggest. The challenge assumes that it is impossible for an omniscient being to learn (which, while not generally true, is true in the case of Divine omniscience...a being who becomes omniscient would learn). That is to say, it assumes that the very impossibility that you've identified is indeed impossible.

The issue is this. Given that an omniscient being, by logic, cannot learn, how can He know what it is like to learn?

On that one, I think Matt, squallybimbadine and others have got the right line.

Another approach to is see all of Man’s Knowing for what it is: a Part of a Whole. Those who view experience as a sort of mechanism to Knowing-A, whether atheist, agnostic, or theistic, cannot account for the Christian statement of Destiny, that which cannot be otherwise, which is this: “We will know Him even as we are known my Him”. Thedegree and the reach of that Destiny where Know-ing is concerned far, far outstrips experience as being any hopeful candidate in the role of mechanism.

Further, God already has the Whole, and in fact is this Whole. Therefore:

If experience is a step toward or a mechanism toward "Knowing-A", and God knows A-Z, what can experience offer Him?

Nothing.

It is but a part of a Whole. When one knows the Whole, one knows the parts necessarily. Failure to realize this is the basis of the error behind this question as well as all sorts of theological errors about Genesis’ explicit language about Eden’s Two Doors, as well as errors along the lines of our friend Ben who labels experience as teh some-total of know-ing. Outright Revelation, outright Sight, outright Behold are never accounted for, and so on and so on.

“We will know Him even as He knows us”. What? The agnostic and atheist cannot factor “bodily experience” into such a destiny for such just cannot ever hope to get us there. There are countless aspects of the Divine which will be revealed on the other side of that horizon that no amount of experience in this life will ever, can ever, reveal to us. Not ever, because experience can’t do that. Know Him as He knows us? Experience is not the road to such a Place. Thus experience is not the necessary ‘thing’. Man quite easily bypasses experience as a necessity where Know-ing is concerned in that arena of knowing Him as He knows us.

That is to say, a certain kind of Man bypasses ‘experience’. If Man insists on “I” in isolation, well then, all he is left with is the dust of Man-Alone. Isolated from Life-Itself. But Man-In-God, God-In-Man, that is a different prospect. As it turns out, despite our Will toward Self, such a Door, such a Tree, remains granted, is granted. Again. Some agnostics cannot account for the Triune Topography of Perfection in their philosophy and so picture “Man” as the product of some sort of mechanical, uni-linear coordinate system void of Perfect Distincts. Experience is reduced to mere Part simply because Agency trumps Experience. To put it another way, Love trumps Experience. Those of the mindset of this question’s premise, perhaps like Ben and Erkki (and perhaps even a small subset of Christians) who hold that experience is the only form of knowing, the only way to know, simply do not understand the Triune Topography of Love, of Perfection, of Knowing, and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Knowledge of Good and Evil is an odd thing once one realizes what Evil is and is not. All are found in Him, the A to Z and, well, we will know Him, the A to Z. What is Love but I and You and the We of I-You? What is Evil but that fierce imprisonment within the Isolated-I? To know the Whole is to know the Part necessarily, and, to Know Him even as He knows us is simply a destiny which bodily experience can never hope to deliver.

We mistake our Self inflicted prison and its topography in The-Now for a proof of Love’s lack of Motion among and between Perfect Distincts. Fortunately, the Trinity resolves these tensions.

"We will know Him even as we are known by Him." That sentence tells us an awful lot about what know-ing can and cannot be and confirms the language of Genesis surrounding Eden and therein we find the agnostic is just wholly off base in the direction of his hopes where mechanism is concerned. If bodily experience is the mechanism, then we would need an infinite bodily experience, and, well, a lot more neurons in our brains. If knowing can bypass experience, which clearly it can given that prophecy of Knowing’s destiny, experience becomes, then, a Part of what is a Whole, an Option among Perfect Distincts there within the Triune topography of Actual-Actuality. Multiple Trees and Vectors. There is some other something where know-ing is concerned and it is found within those Motions Among and Between Perfect Distincts within Love's Triune Topography there within our God Who just Is-Love.

I think that Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy said that God's knowing was in the unbounded now. That seems simple enough and profound enough to silence most critics. Only once have I used it in the course of apologetics. But as always, with most infidels, it's a volitional problem not a logical one.

"And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men." (Luke 2:52)

Through the miracle (and mystery) of the incarnation, God (the Son) experienced human finitude and corporal mortality while still maintaining His divine holiness. (See Phil 2:6-11) So it would follow that God did actually experience human learning at a point in our timeline and has possessed eternal and complete knowledge of this experience--and will forever.

Of course infidels have to strip God of His completeness in order to argue against Him. As usual, they are picking on a straw god. It's time for the infidels to learn the true nature of God and to experience redemption from their foolishness.

I can't help but think that there is a flaw in the logic presented, and here is why:

The author states in premise 3 that "A being's omniscience entails, among other things, that it has all experiential knowledge." He alleges this to be "necessary truth."

It seems he has taken into account no other things that we know about God, first that He is holy. So if God is holy, then He does not know what it is like to sin. As this evidences that He lacks this "experiential" truth. It destroys his premise three, that "experiential knowledge" is necessary to omniscience and anything conclusive is incorrect.

"Knowing what it is like to sin is not the same as sinning. God knows what it is like to sin. But god is not a sinner."

Zactly!

As to what you have agreed to before... "God's knowing makes things what they are."

God made sin sin?

I don't think that God's "knowing" has anything to do with the way things are, especially sin. It is better to say it is Who God is that makes things what they are. To some extent, it does depend on His knowledge, but in the deepest sense, it is because of Who He is.

Anything we make is co-made by God. Because without Him, nothing was made that was made.

If, in sinning, we make something, we do so in such a way that it is sinful for us to do so, but for God co-making the selfsame thing is not a sin.

Or, as I think is equally likely, evil is the privation of good, then neither we nor God make anything when we sin, instead we fail to make something good and God refrains. Our failure is sinful, God's restraint is not.